The Missing Italian Girl (2 page)

The second sheet was their introduction to the Russian girls, written in a language that, under the undulating light, looked like chicken scratches. Maura stared at the sheet. This was Pyotr’s language. One of the worlds he lived in. She dreamed that one day he would take them far away and become a nobleman again, although he said that he did not care about land or wealth. She did not understand him. If she had been born with a silver spoon her mouth, she would have kept it there and enjoyed all the comforts of a great estate. Perhaps, she thought, he did not love her because he knew how selfish she was.

“Maura,” he was saying, “this is important. Stay in the shadows, and when the sun comes, act like two lovers as you cross the bridge and go into the Latin Quarter. Then no one will stop you.”

“But what about you?” Angela asked, reaching for Pyotr’s arm. “Come with us.”

Once again he tucked an errant lock of hair under Angela’s scarf. “Don’t worry. You’ll be safe.”

“No, come.” Even though they had made a plan, suddenly Maura also wanted him to join them. She wanted to be sure that he would be safe.

“No, no. I must take the cart back to the courtyard before my patron wakes up.”

“Why?” Maura wanted to shake him. He was always speaking out against the bosses. “He’s a boss.”

“Yes, a patron, but a good man, and poor like us. We must not involve him. Go,” he urged. “I will join you in a few days.”

With trembling fingers, Maura folded the two sheets of paper and pocketed them. She rubbed her hands along the pants she was wearing, Pyotr’s pants, as if by magic they would give her courage. Then she picked up the heavier bundle of clothes from Angela’s side and threw it over her shoulder. “Come,” she barked. “We have to go.” She ignored the tears in her sister’s eyes and waited impatiently as Angela picked up the other bundle and folded her arms around it.

Behind them, nearer to the water, Pyotr had already grabbed hold of the two poles and was pulling the cart back toward the railroad station, like a beast of burden. Maura did not know whether to be sad or angry or afraid. Tingling with an awareness that someone might be watching, she strode ahead of Angela, acting the part of a swaggering lover as they began their journey.

2

C
LARIE
M
ARTIN WAS IN A
hurry that Friday afternoon. Eager to get home to her little boy, happy that the school year was coming to an end.

She flew out of the teachers’ meeting, intending only to gather her papers and stuff them in her sack. But when she entered her empty classroom, she heard a low, guttural moan. Someone was on her knees at the front of the room below the blackboard.

Claire pushed past her students’ desks to reach her. It was the charwoman, Francesca. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?” Clarie asked as she bent down to help the woman to her feet.

Francesca panted and gasped, then shook her head, unable to speak.

“Here,” Clarie took her gently by the arm and led her to a desk in the front row. “What happened?” She sat down across from her.

Standing, Francesca was a head shorter than Clarie. Shrinking into the student chair, she seemed even smaller. She covered her face with her hands and began to cry. The knotted bun on the top of her head held together strands of hair as dark as Clarie’s, but streaked with gray, oily and unwashed. Catching the pungent smell of the woman’s coarse gray dress, Clarie realized that she had never been this close to Francesca before and knew nothing of her beyond her Christian name. To the Lycée Lamartine’s overworked teachers, the charwomen were mere shadows, appearing at the end of the day to dust and scrub the rooms, readying them for the onslaught of well-fed young ladies who swept in each morning in starched, clean uniforms. It wasn’t right that one did not notice those who toiled into the night. Still, Clarie hesitated to delve into Francesca’s troubles. She had to get home to Jean-Luc.

“It’s all my fault. She did it because of me.”

The sobbing had stopped. The charwoman spoke as if she were in a trance. Clarie folded her hands in her lap, determined to listen for a moment. “You couldn’t have done anything so terrible,” she said soothingly.

Suddenly, Francesca reached for Clarie’s arm. Startled, Clarie pulled away. Then she was ashamed.

“
Per favore
, please,
professoressa
. Maybe you could help me. You have such a kind face.” Francesca’s dark-ringed hazel eyes bore into Clarie’s.

“I really don’t know what I can do.” This was true. Clarie meant to be kind, but….

“Per favore, please.”

It was Francesca’s accent, reminding Clarie of her dear Italian father, that overcame her hesitations. Clarie could not imagine Giuseppe Falchetti ever refusing a cry for help. She took hold of the charwoman’s hand to comfort her. It was rough and chapped, another sign, like her worn face and hunched shoulders, of a life filled with hard labors. “Tell me,” Clarie urged; “tell me what’s wrong.”

“It’s my daughter, Angela. She’s gone. He took her. I’m afraid he’s going to kill her.”

“Someone stole your child?” Alarmed, Clarie sat back in her chair. “Go on,” she whispered.

“He said he was going to marry her. He said if he married her, we would not starve. He said … he promised…. But he’s cruel. He beats her. Now he’s taken her away somewhere. I’m sure of it.” Francesca’s voice grew stronger as she spoke of the man who had hurt her daughter.

“Who is he?” Clarie asked. Her heart began to pound as she tried to understand. Murder. Kidnapping. It could not be.

“He lives in the next building. He works for one of those big new department stores. He hired my daughters, Angela and Maura, to finish shirtwaists. My girls stay in our room and work all day, every day, every single day, sewing on buttons, tying up seams, and still we did not have enough.” Francesca sniffed and wiped her face with a handkerchief she retrieved from her pocket. “He promised that when he married Angela, he would rent sewing machines for us, so we could make more money. Maybe he kept some of the money he should have given to us and used it to bring us presents, so that we would believe him.”

Clarie sensed an undertone of anger and resentment in the Italian woman’s words. Against whom or what? Clarie wondered. The man, her life, or teachers, like Clarie, who came to work every day in the starched, white shirtwaist blouses her daughters labored over? Clarie fingered one of the tiny buttons on her cuff and tried to imagine spending all day sewing them on.

“I let her do it. Let her be with him. She begged me. She wanted to make it easier for me,” Francesca murmured.

“How do you know he beats her?” Clarie asked, hoping that some part of this story was not true.

“Everyone in the building can hear him,” Francesca said as she stared at the floor and began to breathe heavily. “They hear her cries in the courtyard almost every night.”

Clarie gazed at Francesca, picturing what her life must be like. The teachers at the lycée were occasionally assigned to take students to crowded, sewerless tenements, to teach them how to make charity visits. Clarie shook her head. What folly, as if an hour’s “visit” on a bright sunny afternoon would teach privileged young women what poverty was really like. Fortunately, she and her students had never heard shouts or blows during their forays. Yet anyone who even occasionally read a Paris daily had an inkling of what went on in rooms occupied by entire families and common-law liaisons. The thin walls and curtainless windows opening onto dank, dark common courtyards must hold few secrets.

Most of all, Clarie knew what it was to see a child suffer, and then to lose a child. She had lost her firstborn a week after his birth. This was a pain, an ache in her heart, that would never go away. She leaned toward Francesca and waited until the charwoman met her eyes.

“You must go to the police. This man should not be hurting your daughter.”

The older woman pulled away. “Oh no, professoressa, no. We cannot go to the police, they don’t like Italians. They think we are all bad people. No.”

“Then your husband. The girl’s father. He must go to the man and—” Clarie stopped. When Francesca turned away from her, she realized there was no husband.

The neighbors? Did they distrust Italians too? How different it had been in Arles when Clarie was growing up. But that was before the assassinations and bombings, before Frenchmen labeled Italians anarchists and criminals. It was all so unfair. “You are an honest, hardworking woman,” she insisted. “The police will help you.”

“No, no. No one can help. I am alone. Even Maura is gone. She’s probably looking for her sister.” Francesca’s chest began to heave. Clarie could not bear to hear the anguished moans again. To stave them off and calm the charwoman, Clarie asked her to tell more about her daughters and where she thought they could have gone.

Twenty minutes later, Clarie emerged from the cool vestibule of the Lycée Lamartine onto the busy, steamy rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, the long street named for the fishmongers who centuries ago had traveled the road to the Paris markets. Although relieved to leave Francesca and her sorrows behind, Clarie was again struck by the ambivalence that hit her each time she stepped out of the school’s enclosed intellectual universe. Because the neighborhood was close to both the Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est railroad stations, it was dense and growing denser by the day. Long gone were the women taking fish to market, and the fields and estates that used to line their path. Instead, the street was occupied from end to end by shops, restaurants, and sellers hawking from carts. And everywhere—beside, above, and behind the constant commerce—apartments, new and old, crowded down upon the lycée, which was housed in the one of the few mansions that had survived the transformations.

This was not the Paris that Clarie remembered from her days at the teachers’ college in Sèvres when she and her fellow students visited the city to tour its ancient cathedrals and museums. This Paris wore all that was modern and raucous on its sleeve, or rather pasted on pillars, newspaper kiosks and the exposed walls of buildings in the form of posters promoting the latest products and the most risqué entertainments. The famous Medrano Circus, Folies-Bergère and Moulin Rouge lay just outside the
quartier
where the Martins lived. In the poorer districts to the north and east, Clarie knew there were countless café-concerts and dancehalls enticing exploited girls like Francesca’s daughters with the promise of fun and adventure.

Clarie sighed as she began the ten-minute ascent to her home. Her husband, Bernard, professed to love their surroundings, which he called the “true Paris,” ever remaking itself and open to all: bourgeois and workers, artisans and merchants, Christians and Jews. More and more, she wondered if it was a good place to raise a child. Or to be a mother.

A year ago, when they left Nancy, Bernard had pledged to find an apartment close to the school and near to the pocket parks squeezed into the fabric of the modern city. A sharp pain shot through Clarie’s chest as she remembered how one of these oases had become a bitter disappointment.

When the weather had gotten warmer, she had asked her devoted housekeeper, Rose, to bring Jean-Luc to the Square Montholon park during her lunch hour. Clarie would run down the block, around the corner, to the head of the stairs that formed part of the rue Baudin, and look for him. She always hoped to catch him unaware, longing to see that he was happy even without her. Whether she saw him or not, she would race down the three flights of stone stairs to find and embrace him. But her leaving became too heart-breaking. He cried Maman, the very first word he had learned, over and over again. So she stopped going to play with him, feeling him, smelling him. Instead, the faithful Rose came at the appointed hour and Clarie observed from the head of the stairs, hoping to catch sight of his dear head smothered in dark curls, his chubby fingers pointing to a bird or child or toy, his sturdy legs under his gown moving forward to have his turn on the swings with the bigger boys. Oh, how she loved her son.

I am full of good fortune,
she insisted to herself as she distractedly waved away a hawker selling used pots and pans from his cart.
My boy is safe at home.
Unlike Francesca’s daughters. Without ever having seen them, Clarie could almost imagine what they looked like from their mother’s descriptions: Maura, dark and wild; Angela, blond, mild and obedient, so obviously the favorite. Perhaps, Clarie thought, when Francesca finished her work and crossed the outer boulevards to her neighborhood, she would find her girls safe and sound. Perhaps. Somehow Clarie doubted this and hated the doubting.
No
, Clarie thought, hugging her sack to her chest as she stopped to avoid the carriages and carts clattering down the rue de Maubeuge,
wherever she is, she will not be safe if she is still with that brute.

Skirting around shoppers with baskets and men in bowlers, Clarie hurried forward, even though she dreaded the moment she would have to fulfill the promise she’d made to Francesca to seek Bernard’s help. He already had so much to think about, and so many cases like Angela’s. Since his decision to step down from his judgeship, he had had to jump through countless hoops to become an
avocat
, to fulfill his dream of being a lawyer for those who needed justice the most. In the strict hierarchy of the Paris Bar, with all its rigid requirements for becoming a member, he was being treated as an apprentice, getting only charity cases. These paid practically nothing and often came to naught, because the courts cared little about the fate of the troublesome poor. Bernard, Clarie knew, came home to escape his frustrations, not to add to them.

Almost without thinking, Clarie followed the inviting aroma of warm bread into the
boulangerie
at the corner of her street, the rue Rodier. She always picked up two baguettes for their dinner, and if she were really hungry would have bitten off the crusty narrow end of one of them by the time she reached the middle of the block. This time she slowed her steps and chewed while plotting her approach. She would remind Bernard of Rose, of the fact that they had agreed to bring their housekeeper to Paris from Nancy in part because one of her sons had beaten her (and, of course, because Rose had become indispensable, almost a grandmother to Jean-Luc). Yes, Rose, she thought triumphantly. They had performed this bit of justice for her, they could do it for others.